“We are in international airspace,” said Greenstreet calmly. “Conducting routine training missions. You will desist from bothering us.”
The Chinese aircraft regrouped to the west. After radioing their controller for instructions, they were apparently told to go home and did so, without comment.
“Tail between their legs and bye-bye,” said Cowboy. “That ends that.”
“I doubt it,” said Greenstreet. Then he added, much to Turk’s surprise, “Good timing, Basher Three. We’ll make a Marine aviator out of you yet.”
15
Braxton nearly missed the import of the warning: Chinese agent Wen-lo had been transported in the last few days to the Mao carrier task force.
Wen-lo was one of several Chinese agents who’d tried to contact Braxton and reach an “accommodation” with Kallipolis over the past several years. The fact that he had been taken to the Chinese carrier task group operating in the near vicinity meant that he was looking to up his game.
Braxton had never met Wen-lo, but he detested him nonetheless as a pawn of a repressive regime. He hated the Chinese government at least as much as he hated America’s, and had vehemently rebuffed all attempts at contact. Other members of Kallipolis would have been far more accommodating; they saw nothing wrong with selling older technology to them. “They’ll steal it anyway” was a common excuse.
Braxton did a quick search for additional news on Wen-lo, but the rest of the results were several months old. Wen-lo worked for PLA-N technical intelligence — the Chinese navy. Though still in his thirties, he had the rank of hai jun da xiao, equivalent to a rear admiral or OF-6 in the American navy. So presumably he could command decent resources from the task force.
Too many distractions, thought Braxton. He would focus on the Dreamland Whiplash people for now and deal with the Chinese later on.
16
It was as easy as child’s play — assuming the child was very, very bright.
The reef on the target island had helped hide an underwater refueling and stocking area. There was space for two bays; at the bottom below the ever-shifting sand there was an automated mechanism for refueling the submersibles. The equipment was relatively simple — on par with equipment used by robot vacuum cleaners, one of Rubeo’s techies quipped — but it was entirely autonomous: there was no need for a human to initiate the process or intervene in any way. It was one more indication of how sophisticated the people behind the UAV system were.
It also gave the intel people numerous leads. Combined with the material recovered from the UAV that had been shot down, they had a large number of leads and were rapidly filling in details about the people behind the drones.
More important in the short term, the underwater structure gave them something to look for. Or rather, it gave their computers a new set of parameters to try to match.
They found a match on an island in the Sembuni Reefs, roughly eight miles away. About a square mile, it was much larger than the island where the submarine station had been found, and also uninhabited. It was just south of the disputed zone with China, along the edge of the main shipping channels.
But they also found a match in a place nearly four hundred miles farther north, on a formation known as Final Reef — and half a dozen other names, depending on who was doing the naming.
The reef was in the contested zone between Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and China. Malaysia and the Philippines claimed the reef based on its location along the continental shelf; the other two countries claimed the area by ancient fishing rights. In a maneuver designed to boost their claims — not just to that reef, but to the Kalayaan islands — the Philippine government had sent an old American merchant transport, the Final Pleasure, to the atoll five years before, using it as a base for a half-dozen Filipino marines who essentially asserted squatter rights there. The Chinese had responded by stationing an ever-changing flotilla of fishing vessels in the area; when one left, another would invariably take its place. Malaysia and Vietnam occasionally sent patrol boats to the vicinity; there had been two shooting incidents over the past eighteen months, with the patrol boats shooting “in the area of” a Chinese fishing vessel and the Filipino ship. There were no injuries in either case, nor had there been a noticeable effect on the conflict.
“The location of this last base is very delicate,” said Reid. “Geopolitically — this is potentially a land mine.”
“That may very well be why it’s there,” suggested Rubeo.
“If it’s a base at all,” said Reid. “There’s a single girder at the stern of the ship, underwater.”
“The metal is identical to the others,” said Rubeo. “We see a rope ladder coiled on the deck. It is certainly worth checking.”
“No sub there,” said Reid.
“The proximity to the reef makes it difficult to be certain,” noted Rubeo. “That entire side of the ship is shadowed by the hull and the reef. But we have no firm evidence of a sub, no.”
“They must be working with the Filipinos,” said Breanna, “if they have a base there.”
“Or they’re paying the equivalent of rent,” said Reid. “That would be more their style. The images of the merchant ship don’t show a large presence, if there’s one at all.”
Reid pulled up a brief PowerPoint slide show on the island conflict prepared by a CIA analyst. Most of the slides were attempting to put the conflict into the larger context, but three showed the merchant ship and made estimates of its capabilities and the size of the force there. If the conspiracy had a large base on the ship or the surrounding reef, it was extremely well-hidden.
“We have to check it out,” said Reid. “At a minimum.”
“True.”
“And even if this is some sort of mistake on our part — even if there is no base on the atoll, the fact that there are two submarines that we can identify, the fact that there are definitely two bases — it’s larger than we thought and much more involved.”
Breanna waved her hand over the screen, moving back to the slide on Braxton. Even after all these years, she recognized the face — hollow cheeks, bleached white skin, eyes that seemed a size too small for the head. He was still thin, and his hair, once long, was cut to a quarter inch of his scalp. It was prematurely white now, and he had a scar over his right eye, but the stare was familiar.
“If we’re serious about finding them,” said Breanna, “we have to move quickly. And we can’t tell the Filipinos.”
“Well…”
They looked at each other. Both had worked together long enough to know each other’s thoughts.
“If we tell the White House, there’s a good possibility things will get very complicated,” said Breanna.
“If we tell the President.”
“We’re authorized to pursue Braxton and Kallipolis already.”
“We are.”
“I’d say we should just pursue it and not ask for permission,” said Breanna.
“I think I have to agree. We already have authorization.”
Breanna considered the situation. The Chinese had not registered a protest.
Which was worse? Waiting and possibly missing Braxton, or stumbling into an international incident?
“Better to ask forgiveness than permission,” she said finally.
“Agreed. Let’s authorize the mission.”
TAKEN
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